Blog - Top 10 features our SAP for Utilities customers love - Part I

At Basis Technologies we understand the importance of clients’ success and satisfaction. If our solutions are making our customers happy we know we are developing the right products and providing a good service.

Being out in the field implementing our tools, I inevitably spend a lot of time with our customers, and these are the top ten most popular features that our customers tell me they love. (Part I, for features 1-5, check back in a couple of weeks for Part II, features 6-10).

If you’re currently running SAP IS-U or CR&B these features might give you some inspiration to ensure that your front and back office have all the tools they need in order to work as efficiently as possible to ensure customer service excellence.

1. Real time 360 degree view of a customer

The BDEx Customer Centric Hub provides a 360-degree view of the customer. It is the only tool that presents all relevant information from IS-U and CR&B along with other information linked to the customer - like implausible reads and billing outsorts - in a single transaction enabling faster investigation and significant savings and agent productivity.

The tool can understand over 40 different exception types and gives you all the open work for a customer in real time enabling users to see everything of interest without the need for extensive training in all the different modules and transactions of an SAP IS-U/CRM system.

Our customers have found their agents have a greater understanding of what’s happening in the system and can provide more informed discussions with their customers.

A large Utility in the U.K. spoke to their agents to find out what they thought of BDEx, this was one quote taken from the user;

My customer told me I had been more helpful on this one call than all the calls put together since they became our customer. This was a direct reflection of using BDEx to see all the problems relating the account, giving me the insight to answer my customer’s questions.

2. Execute over 300 actions in one place

The BDEx Customer Centric Hub is not just a source of information but an exceptions management tool. Users can not only see the open issues but are able to do something about it.

The BDEx CCH has right-click actions on each work item and master data enabling the user to execute functions and complete business processing from one single SAP screen. BDEx understands SAP functions, therefore, users are launched directly into the processing screen and do not need to enter any customer data or transaction codes saving both the users time and sanity.

Customers have told us their users are much happier as it has simplified a complicated system.

3. Collated SAP notes from multiple systems

Notes can be added to various work items and even across different systems in SAP. This makes it very time consuming and frustrating for an SAP user to find all of the notes relating to their customer and knowing which are relevant in regard to the exception or query they are dealing with.

That is why the BDEx Customer Centric Hub has a notes tab collating notes from items across SAP including CRM Interaction Records, BPEM/EMMA cases, service orders and IS-U business contacts. Users can enter free text to search and find the relevant notes in one screen, one step saving lots of time and process steps to access this information.

4. Invoice history display

Billing is a three step process in SAP. The consumption charges are applied in a billing document, then any financials such as credits, ad hoc charges and taxes are applied in an invoicing document and payment etc. are applied to open line items associated with the print document header tables.

This makes it a difficult and long-winded process for a user to understand which billing periods are invoiced and how charges/payments have been applied in the system, particularly in a complex rebill situation.

Our customers have recognised this as an issue and informed us that after completing several training and upskill projects to educate their teams how to use the financial transactions available in SAP, they still have users who do not understand the information in these screens and make costly errors such as issuing incorrect refunds to the customer and applying multiple credits.

The invoice history display available in the BDEx Customer Centric Hub collates the billing, invoicing and payment status together to provide clear and concise information about the invoices in one screen for the user.

5. Get an email when a work item has been resolved

It would be great to have all Back Office teams that can resolve any work item in SAP, however, our customers have recognized that the feasibility of this is limited.

There are lots of specialized modules in SAP and although cross training can be applied it is not always practical for a large utilities business. In addition, exceptions can be interdependent and certain work items breed other work items creating a dependency upon the order in which the exceptions are resolved. Sometimes there can be a requirement for an exceptions team agent to wait for another item to be resolved before they can complete their work.

Our customer’s agents used to manage this via email alerts, spreadsheets or even just using Post-It notes, which as you can imagine is not the most effective or reliable methods. It was time-consuming for the agents and hey were required to continually check if the work had been resolved on the account.

To reduce time wastage and provide a reliable solution the agents can now add a work item to their BDEx Watch List in the BDEx Customer Centric Hub. This records that the agent has registered its interest and when the work item is completed, whether by the system or another user, a notification is triggered to the agent either via standard email or a message into their SAP inbox to inform the agent that the issue is now resolved.